Fans of the Coen brothers, possibly
my personal favorite pair of directors currently in the business, have long
noted that a great many of their films are just as much about capturing the
essence of a specific time and place as they are about story and characters (if
indeed there is a “story” at all). It’s
hard to imagine the plot of Fargo
having the same emotional resonance outside a land as numbingly flat and a
culture as unfailingly polite as that of the northern Midwest. Take the characters of No Country For Old Men away from the crime-ridden border between
Mexico and Texas, and the entire story simply wouldn’t happen. True
Grit is a Western, and like any proper Western, the vast, lonely landscape
is an entire character in and of itself.
A Serious Man, while not
relying so much on a specific location, is a film very much set within affluent
Jewish-American culture. In their latest
entry, a meandering tale of a young musician struggling to make it, the Coens
choose as their setting the New York Greenwich Village music scene circa 1961,
just before the folk music revival sparked by the arrival of legends like Bob
Dylan.

Llewyn’s sad, jaded, and cynical
face is both the first and the last thing we see. On both occasions, he’s performing at the Gaslight
Café, singing a mournful ballad of a man who’s less afraid of death than he is
of lying alone and cold beneath the earth for Lord knows how long. Like all of the songs Llewyn sings over the
course of the film (the aptly-named Oscar Isaac, along with the rest of the cast,
did his own singing for the soundtrack), you can hear a great amount of himself
in the music and words. He is clearly
talented, and clearly passionate about what he does, and yet his career appears
to be leading nowhere. In part, this is
because of difficulties with his efforts to reinvent himself as a singer following the death of
his longtime collaborator Mike (whose voice in several recordings is provided
by Markus Mumford). The frustration all this
brings him is kicked up a notch when he learns that a fellow aspiring performer
has already landed a major record deal with a good agent, despite the fact
that, in Llewyn’s view, he lacks “higher brain functions.”

He's one of the more sympathetic Coen protagonists we've gotten in awhile, but being able to sympathize
with Llewyn doesn't mean we are able to like him very much- his constant streak of bad luck is topped
only by his incredible ability to offend everyone who tries to help him, along
with his tendency to get other people’s girlfriends pregnant (while also trying to borrow money from them). Even his reverence for music is pushed to an alienating
extreme- he’s offended when friends ask him to play at parties and disgusted
when an audience sings along with a performance. His life seems to consist of one long,
endless cycle- perform, record a song or two, grab a few bucks, infringe on the
hospitality of a small checklist of friends, insult everyone in the room, get
thrown out, rinse, wash, repeat- and by the end you can’t help but feel that,
like Sisyphus pushing his boulder, he’s damned to repeat this cycle
forever. This conclusion is aided by the
fact that it’s left deliberately vague how often all this has happened
before.

This journey through Llewyn’s own
personal Hell is broken only by the musical numbers, where the movie graciously
pauses to let the sound of the music fill out the corners of the scene. There
is no effort to rush through any of them or push them into the background- when
it’s time for someone to sing, that becomes, for a brief moment, the center of
the entire film. Although I could
understand some claiming these scenes are superfluous non-sequitors, I felt
they served the crucial purpose of reminding us why Llewyn cannot bring himself
to stop performing, even as his chances at success grow longer with each
passing day. In a way, music is the only
thing that really humanizes him time and again.
He lies, he smooth-talks, he insults, he sinks to a number of lows in
just the few short days of his life we see, but when he sings, he can’t help
but abandon all of his otherwise omnipresent pretensions and worries. The music simply doesn't allow it. He’s certainly no hero, but neither is he a
villain. Like most people, he’s somewhere
in that every-murky middle area.

For the attentive viewer, there are a few amusing shout-outs to previous Coen films. In a brief detour to Chicago, Llewyn shares a
car with John Goodman’s sharp-tongued jazz musician and his “chauffeur,” a man
whose scarcity of speech can’t help but remind one of Steve Buscemi’s
recalcitrant partner in Fargo. Llewyn himself, a man struck by one round of seemingly
random bad luck after another, may remind others of the equally hapless Larry
Gopnik in A Serious Man. And in a particularly apt turn, we learn that
the cat whose escapades keep getting Llewyn into trouble is named Ulysses,
after the Greek legend whose adventures inspired O Brother Where Art Thou (and which also featured an exploration of
American musical genres).

It’s always an odd experience
watching a film with a protagonist who’s constantly deceptive, yet feels so
genuine in their own way. That’s one of
the great strengths of how the Coen brothers exercise their craft- they can
make even their most extreme, weirdest, off-beat characters feel like real
people they happened across in a pub, in some tucked-away corner of the
world. That strength is on full display here, but it's not the only thing that makes this movie something special in a year full of retreads, sequels, and reboots- more than being about any one character, Inside Llewyn Davis is also about music as an art form in and of itself, and how devotion to an art can both elevate us and pull us down, and how there's sometimes no real reason for either one to happen. It's a small
film, and a quiet film, and it certainly won’t please some, but there are few
other films in their canon that find the Coens in such solid artistic
form.